Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

July, 1995.

Not long after the fateful night of Cedric’s death and someone else’s resurrection, Harry had begun feeling… weird.

Not ill, precisely. More like - itchy.

At first he’d attributed it to the beginnings of what Madam Pomfrey had patiently explained to his House back in second year - hair growing in places it hadn’t before did sound like an itchy experience - but when he looked at his armpits, or the juncture where his thighs met his torso, there wasn’t anything, just like there hadn’t been a year ago, when Harry had first started to think he was ‘developing’ rather late.

Well, if it wasn’t puberty, then the question remained: what was making him itchy? Harry pondered the matter over the first days of July, sweating under the sun in Number Four’s back garden. He caught himself scratching at his arms, his shoulders, his back; it was worse where his clothes were tighter to the skin, so he got some initial relief by tying Dudley’s baggy shorts looser at the waist, tucking his T-shirt into the waistband to hold it up, but it wasn’t a perfect solution. His arms, legs, and face, after all, had nothing on them, and they still itched, albeit to a lesser degree.

Was it the laundry detergent? He checked the container one afternoon, even comparing it against the empty one in the rubbish bin, but they were identical down to the ingredients list, and washing his clothes without detergent didn’t seem to make a difference either.

Ultimately, trying not to scratch his itchy skin proved a futile effort, and by the third day Harry gave in and indulged in dragging his work-blunted nails over the length of his legs, especially at night, chasing the fleeting satisfaction of the act until he fell asleep. He’d expected to find dried blood under his fingernails in the morning, and red scoring along his calves and ankles, or around his waist, where he’d itched the most - but examination upon awakening showed nothing of the sort, only that he felt better. The once-itchy patches might have been a little shinier, maybe, with the new skin exposed, but that was it, as far as he could see (which wasn’t far: it wasn’t as though his glasses’ prescription had been updated recently).

So he went for it, scratching the last itchy patches on his legs and over his belly. New places started to itch the day after: the nape of his neck, the back of his ears, the juncture of his neck and shoulders. On the fifth evening, while putting away the gardening tools in the Dursleys’ shed, Harry discovered that the shed’s unpainted brick interior walls made for an immensely satisfying scratching post, one which cleared up the itching on his shoulder with less than a few minutes of rubbing against it. Knowing the Dursleys wouldn’t come looking for him, he closed the shed door, stripped off his shirt, and spent a good half-hour relieving the itching on his shoulders and back.

As days became a week, he at last got a real itch on his arms, and that was when something much weirder became apparent.

The scars on his arms - the basilisk bite, the ugly slash from Wormtail’s dagger, the old stripes on his back from Vernon’s belt - were all disappearing once the itch was gone.

Okay, Harry thought, this has to be some kind of magic.

He emphatically was not complaining - not when he’d had to put so much work into hiding the scars on his back at Hogwarts, lest he be asked questions he didn’t want to answer. Harry gladly sanded away (in a sense) every last trace of his early life in Surrey, smiling at what he could see of his reflection in the cracked mirror hung in the back of his wardrobe, behind the piles of Dudley’s old toys. Part of him was a little annoyed to lose the basilisk bite scar - that one had had a cool story to it - but eh. Whatever.

The itching continued to move over the following days. It crept up his jaw, over his cheeks, across his nose, over his eyelids - and that last area proved the most bothersome: he’d found an old rag to rub at his eyelids with, but it took four nights to finally get the itch to go away. Only then, with the slight shine to his new skin reaching the top of his nose, over his eyebrows, did Harry begin to wonder what would happen to his scar. Would it, too, be polished away? 

(Because it did feel like polishing, he’d decided - no better word for the lingering gleam to his skin wherever the urge to scratch had been satisfied. The parts of his face he’d polished almost glowed in the moonlight, making his reflection seem at once stranger and more familiar-)

Preemptive scratching, Harry had already learned, did nothing. He resolved to wait until it felt ready.

As if his body had sensed his impatience, though, the itching moved to unexpected places: the backs of his knees, his palms, his elbows, his bare feet. Harry had accidentally bleached his feet before, when he was much younger; there had been a burning sensation he’d suffered through, locked in the cupboard, while Petunia ignored his requests to be let out, and the next day, the rough bottoms had started to peel. This time, there were no chemical irritants, and Harry was fascinated to see the calluses come off in several large flakes, rather than the vaguely shiny dust he’d finally noticed accumulating against the bricks in the shed. Underneath was that same gleaming skin as he’d uncovered everywhere else, just slightly tougher than the fine, soft texture of his polished arms and legs. He got between his toes that night, and the next day attended to his cuticles and under his nails with the old rag, and only then, when the entire rest of his body had acquired the polished glimmer he was growing fond of, did Harry finally feel the welcome itch starting on his forehead, from his temples across his brow, and over his scar.

On the thirteenth day of Harry’s curious transformation, he awoke to the most awful sensation of his eyeballs itching. Blind groping about for some way to scratch that let him discover a tiny bit of unpolished skin in the outer corners of each eye, which, when he picked at it, seemed to - eugh - peel away at each eyeball. The relief was shortly followed by him retching into the bathroom sink - ignoring Petunia’s screeching from downstairs about him taking too long, hurry up and make breakfast, boy - and then discovering, to his utter fascination, that he could see.

As in, without his glasses.

“What the fuck,” Harry muttered under his breath, looking up into the bathroom mirror-

“What the fuck,” he repeated, more fervently, because with clear vision he could see what his blurred vision hadn’t: the real source of the ‘shine’ he’d thought he was seeing before.

He had scales.

Not just on his face - he had scales everywhere. They caught the light as seamless as satin, lending a nigh-unnatural smoothness to his face; Harry had the passing thought that he probably would never need to learn to shave. Thank Merlin my eyebrows didn’t disappear, he thought. Or my hair.

He gave a last swipe of the face towel across his forehead, gathering up the last patches of scales he’d missed yesterday, and worked up the nerve to see what had happened to his scar.

It was faded, but not completely gone, which would have been very confusing for his friends. Would have been very confusing for Harry, now he thought about it. He couldn’t imagine what he’d look like without it at this point in his life-

“Boy! Get down here this instant!”

“Ugh,” Harry grumbled, and made his way downstairs.

Chapter Text

For all that they had always been eager to pick out every other instance of Harry’s “freakishness” over the years, on the matter of his new scales, the Dursleys were unusually silent. He was almost disappointed: part of him had been looking forward to their reactions.

(The same part that had been hoping he’d get kicked out.)

It was weird that they were so unobservant - enough that he wondered if magic was involved. Harry side-eyed Petunia over the rims of his glasses, which he’d rested just on the tip of his nose to maintain the illusion of still needing them; she didn’t seem to pay any less attention to him than any other day.

Whatever. More importantly, Harry took the opportunity to shatter the glass lenses while he did the dishes, rinsing the shards down the kitchen sink: he would keep the frames, for now, and maybe find a spell to charm plain glass into them when he got back to Hogwarts. Not for the first time, he wondered if there were potions he could have taken to fix his eyesight, or something like that - magic would be a convenient scapegoat for his cured vision.

Running his thumb around the emptied frames, Harry discovered a sharp bit of glass remaining that ought to have scratched him, but didn’t. A bit of experimentation confirmed his suspicion: his scales were stronger than his skin had been.

Curious.

More differences - improvements - made themselves apparent as the day went on. The heat outside seemed less oppressive, though the weather programme on the telly confirmed it was even hotter than the day before; the intense midday sunlight that would have burned him last week was now comfortable. Harry hauled bags of fertilizer from the shed without even breaking a sweat, much less flushing from exertion - in fact, his complexion didn’t change at all. It would make keeping a straight face even easier, the next time Vernon yelled at him, or Dudley and his friends tried to taunt him into a fight… why, when he got back to Hogwarts, he could stare Snape down without a single word.

(Or pretend that he wasn’t mad at Ron and Hermione for not writing anything worthwhile to him, this summer.

Because he was.)

Harry’s decided contentment with his new state of being was short-lived, however: it seemed as though, the moment he’d accepted one transformation, his body started another. Midnight found Harry sitting up in bed at the sudden pang of hunger unlike anything he’d felt in years, and tearing into the stash under his bedroom’s loose floorboard without a care for rationing it.

He ate nearly half his supply before he could even think clearly again - and he still was hungry.

As a child, before he’d learned he was a wizard, Harry would have wrestled that feeling down, knowing - miserably - that it would get him nowhere, and telling himself he would just have to wait. Now, however…

Harry now was getting more food, and had already decided in the morning that he no longer cared what the Dursleys did about it.

When Harry had returned after his second year to find the bars back in his window - the ones that had been torn out in the debacle the summer before, with Ron and the twins and the flying Ford Anglia - he had, of course, given them a yank to see if they were really fixed back in place or just made to look like they were. They’d held firm, and he’d never quite tried to test that observation a second time.

Tonight, the fixative seemed to have degraded, or perhaps he had somehow gotten stronger: the bars gave way with comparatively little effort, taking a chunk of the window frame with them, with only a soft crunch as it was all ripped away. Harry set them down on his pile of dirty laundry, carefully, so the metal wouldn’t clunk against the floor.

Then, just as carefully, he hauled himself out of the open window.

“Wow,” Harry muttered under his breath when he landed. “That wasn’t bad at all.” In fact, he’d barely felt the impact. Had his bones gotten stronger, too?

It was a simple matter, now, to go around to the back door of Number Four, pick the lock with the tools Fred and George had jokingly (or not-so-jokingly) gifted him over last Christmas, and sneak into the kitchen downstairs, where the leftover leg of ham from dinner was sitting in the fridge.

Ooh, it was still a little warm.

Harry set upon the ham immediately, gnawing it down to bare bone and gristle - emptied the leftover bowl of baked beans - stuffed his face with the triple-cooked chips Petunia had insisted he make as a ‘reward’ for Dudley’s successful diet - even dug into the mushy peas his aunt had taken to serving for herself at every dinner. He downed two of Dudley’s sports drinks, and the last of the milk, and polished off the ‘nice’ loaf of bread in the cabinet that he would have only gotten to eat a few days from now, when it’d gone stale…

The fridge was all but empty by the time he was finally satisfied. Harry eyed the ham bone: should he save it for soup? Or did he not give a damn? He yawned, getting up from the table, and decided he would just leave the whole mess of plates and utensils where they were, the way his slob relatives would have done. Wouldn’t it be funny if they got the blame?

All there was to do now was go back upstairs, pick the seven locks on his door open, and go back to bed-

Ah, but he could also unlock his cupboard, couldn’t he? Harry blinked out of his imminent food-coma and checked the clock - quarter to one. Plenty of time.

By one in the morning, he’d hauled his trunk up the stairs - easier than ever with his apparently-strengthened muscles - and unlocked the door to his bedroom, which only had two locks that actually needed a key. Harry hid the trunk in his closet, for now, and fitted the bars back onto his window; then, content at last, went back to sleep.

He’d see what came of his adventure in the morning.

“-can’t believe you would do this!”

Harry blinked awake to the sounds of Petunia’s shrill yelling - from downstairs.

As in, not at him.

“-should never have had the boy make you those chips-”

He stifled a laugh behind his hand. Was Dudley really getting the blame?

“-even the peas, good lord-”

Dudley hated mushy peas. In fact, if Harry listened carefully, he could hear his cousin whinging as much.

“-must have been Harry, mum, I swear-”

There came the sound of two pairs of footsteps on the stairs, and up to Harry’s door. He braced himself for an inquisition at - what time was it? He checked the alarm clock - half-seven.

“It’s locked, Dudley. You can’t blame him this time - much as I’d like to.”

Petunia wasn’t trying to pin the blame on him? Wow. This was better entertainment than Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Eventually, the aforementioned locks were undone, and he was summoned downstairs to clean up “Dudley’s” mess in the kitchen, while Dudley whinged and complained about not getting more breakfast, and Petunia insisted he had had quite enough with his midnight snack, so he would have to settle for just one helping.

Dudley turned pleading eyes on his father when she left the room. Vernon passed him a twenty-pound note and suggested he “go down to Toby’s for an early lunch,” which cheered Harry’s cousin up immediately.

None of them even looked at Harry askance.

He’d completely gotten away with it.

This was awesome.

Harry was obliged to spend the rest of that day locked in his room, since he’d done all the chores yesterday and Petunia hadn’t come up with new ones yet. This suited him fine, now that he had his trunk in the room with him, and he passed Hedwig the cold soup his aunt sent through the cat-flap at dinnertime, because he was still digesting all he’d eaten the previous night and didn’t need any more.

Or so he’d thought: like clockwork, at midnight, ravenous hunger overtook him a second time, and Harry emptied out his loose-floorboard pantry before he could muster up an ounce of self-restraint.

Tonight, however, he had the Invisibility Cloak from his trunk. And his broom.

And as he’d heard Vernon discussing in the morning, the nearest Tesco had begun operating twenty-four hours a day.

Thus Harry began what would become a nightly habit: leaping out of his window just after midnight, walking down to the Tesco under the Cloak, and stuffing a pillowcase with whatever he wanted off the shelves, invisible, before walking right out. He left the Firebolt in the bushes on the side of the house, so he could float himself back up and through the window again, easy as pie.

(Speaking of pie, the ready-to-eat Tesco meat pies were pretty good.)

One large meal a day was more than enough to satisfy him, too, which meant he wasn't concerned with eating what little the Dursleys wanted to give him, and the cozy sleepiness that came with being full managed to overcome even the most persistent of his nightmares: Harry slept solidly for the rest of the night, and was less and less bothered by his friends' unhelpful letters, wherein they confessed to having secrets but wouldn't tell him what they were, and insisted that he remain content with the information blackout, and didn't even tell him how their day was, anymore, like his last irritated responses had asked them to…

Some two weeks after that, in the days leading up to his birthday, Harry paused to examine his reflection in his bedroom's cracked mirror and realized he'd gotten taller.

Not just taller - broader. His shoulders actually filled out the secondhand shirt he was wearing, and he only had to cinch Dudley's old shorts with the drawstring, whereas at the beginning of the summer he'd used a safety pin to fold the waistband smaller. He took the shirt off and found that he couldn't count his vertebrae, or his ribs; he couldn't encircle his wrist between his thumb and index finger; and, best of all, he didn't have to stretch to reach the dusty shelf at the top of his wardrobe, which had been a great bother to access the summer before.

The growth spurt made sense, sure - he was finally getting enough food, and enough protein, specifically, to build some muscle - but it still threw him for a bit of a loop to see the difference so immediately. Harry rummaged through his trunk for his Hogwarts uniform, just to compare, and determined that he had gained at least four inches in height since this time last year - three more than he'd gained the year before.

That's it, he thought firmly. I need clothes.

A familiar owl alighted on his windowsill, bearing a letter from Sirius - more of the same wishy-washy "keep your nose down" advice that he didn’t need to hear. Harry went to shoo the owl away without bothering to answer, the way he'd been doing lately-

-when it occurred to him that Sirius was rich.

Dear Snuffles,

Good to hear from you as usual. Look, never mind the stuff that's none of my business, all right? Just, can you send me some Muggle money?

-H.

Chapter Text

Now, Sirius Black was an alright bloke, when he wasn’t royally pissing Harry off - so Harry figured he could get a good fifty pounds off of him from that letter. Maybe a hundred, but even twenty pounds would be more than enough to get him some clothes that fit from the charity shop on the ‘bad’ (that is, poor) side of Little Whinging.

(Could Harry just steal what he wanted? Sure, but even if the charity shop were open all-hours like Tesco, he had standards.)

Anyway. What Harry hadn’t accounted for, in asking Sirius for a nonspecific amount of Muggle money, was that - between being bloody rich, a wizard, and twelve years in prison - Sirius had no idea how much Muggle money was worth.

Prongslet,

Hope this is enough. I’ve included a blank cheque for anything larger. Write me right away if you need more cash, yeah?

- S.

Harry sat down at his desk and counted the notes from the envelope for a fourth time.

It was still two thousand pounds.

He put his head in his hands. Grinned brilliantly down at the wood of his desk.

Sirius Black - what an absolute legend.

That Saturday, the Dursleys went out for a day trip to visit Dudley’s Aunt Marge. This was no longer a problem for Harry, because ever since the Incident of Summer, 1993, the Dursleys knew better than to have Marge and Harry in the same house, let alone the same room. He prepared himself for another day in the company of Mrs. Figg and her numerous cats, as that was where he’d been sent off to last year.

Instead, Petunia left Harry alone in Number Four, with only a stern look and orders to ‘behave’ while they were gone. She even left his bedroom door unlocked.

He chose not to examine any of this happenstance too closely. Instead, when an hour had passed since Vernon’s car had left the driveway, he left Number Four for a day trip of his own.

(He still went out the window under the Cloak, of course, by sheer force of habit. And remained invisible for as long as it took to get to the bus stop a few streets over, at which point he stowed the Cloak in his school satchel, next to the absurd stack of fifty-pound notes Sirius had posted him, and the carefully-folded blank cheque in a side pocket within the bag.)

A quick stop in the corner store got him snacks and the smaller coinage needed for bus fare; Harry munched contentedly on a large bag of crisps for the ride to the nearest train station, and arrived just in time to buy a ticket for the midmorning train to London.

Never mind the charity shop: he wanted to go to Harrods.

It should be mentioned that, having spent the majority of the last five years either in Hogwarts or trapped in Privet Drive, Harry had no experience whatsoever in getting around London. It wasn’t as though Muggles had enchanted maps they could carry in their hand to navigate with - the best he had was a free map for tourists from a newsstand at the London end of his train trip.

Fortunately, Harrods was a tourist destination, and therefore had an outsize presence on the map - so he found his way there with little trouble. And then stopped outside the entrance to stare up, awed, at the great building, because wow. It was just like it was in the magazines.

It also seemed to have a dress code, which made him pluck self-consciously at his ill-fitting secondhand clothes. The doorman had let him in, sure, but that was after turning away a pack of rowdy teenagers - he certainly wasn’t dressed nearly as well as any of the other people inside.

“Er, excuse me,” Harry addressed the nearest store employee. “Can you direct me to the mens’ section?”

He expected to be sneered at down the length of the man’s nose - a reaction he had grown accustomed to in the Muggle world. But in this, as usual, Harry had forgotten he no longer looked like a scruffy street urchin: rather than sneer, the salesman smiled at him, and further, offered to lead him to the menswear department himself, as he was on his way to that floor already.

“That would be great, thanks,” Harry said, trying not to act too surprised at his good fortune.

Merlin, he loved being pretty.

The salesman introduced himself as Christopher as he led Harry through the winding maze of different departments, passing glittering lights and fanciful displays and many a well-to-do browsing at their leisure. Gentle inquiries along the walk as to what Harry would like to buy led to him admitting he needed quite a lot, and - confidentially, while they were alone in the lift - that he had a more-or-less unlimited sum of funds with which to obtain it all.

“Ah, is that so?” murmured Christopher as they stepped into Menswear, which was in fact the entire floor. “Well, then, if I might make a few recommendations…”

Harry was happy to let him make recommendations - more than content, indeed, to have Christopher appoint himself his personal assistant for the day, and show him around the entire store with polite enthusiasm. It was the kind of not-quite-fawning Harry supposed he deserved, once it was made obvious he (or, well, Sirius, technically) was filthy rich.

He enjoyed the attention, even, now that it was for something he felt like he deserved - a sentiment further bolstered by an expert peppering of just the right amount of compliments over the next several hours, as Harry accumulated a wardrobe's worth of clothing ranging from ‘posh casual’ to ‘posh fancy’. This included not only regular clothes and outerwear, but also socks and underthings and a dozen ties and a gorgeous gold watch that Harry absolutely could not resist when he saw it on display.

(“An excellent choice, sir,” Christopher remarked, snapping his fingers to beckon the jeweler. “We will have the wristband adjusted for you before you leave.”)

He paused for lunch at a restaurant on the dining floor, then reconvened with the salesman at the Harrods in-house tailor to get one of the 'posh fancy' outfits altered on rush order.

By the time they'd found the right pair of shoes to go with his new clothes - and several more pairs besides, for the rest of the wardrobe - it was midafternoon. Christopher gave Harry a short tour of the jewelry department, where he was normally assigned, and then they returned upstairs to pick up Harry's alterations. He felt rather like he had on his first trip to Diagon Alley in '91, when he'd left Madam Malkin's in the first set of clothes he could truly call his own: a proper person, not just his aunt's unwanted nephew.

Now, he left Harrods feeling proper in the Muggle fashion, his satchel one blank cheque and eleven hundred pounds lighter, with Christopher’s business card, several receipts, and a ticket with which to pick up the rest of his wardrobe next week stowed in the bag’s inside pocket.

All I need now, Harry thought, admiring his reflection in a nearby shop’s tinted window, is a haircut. 

The salon in Harrods had been a little too much like the place Petunia had dragged him to as a child for his tastes; easier to find a quiet barber shop out here on the street, of which there were plenty, now that he was looking. Harry’s eyes lit on a pair of well-dressed gentlemen stepping out of one such shop front just then: he could see no one but the barber left inside, and a sign in the window that read Walk-Ins Welcome, and so decided to go in there.

“Here for a trim, eh, lad?” mused the barber, a broad fellow with a very crisply maintained moustache and beard. He gestured to the singular chair in the center of the room. “What would you like?”

“Er,” said Harry, settling down. “I don’t know what to ask for… it’s been a bit out of control my whole life? My aunt used to cut it,” leaving out that said haircut had happened only one time, to disastrous effect.

The barber took pity on him, thank goodness, and offered Harry a laminated sheet of photographs. “I would recommend one of these options, here,” he said, indicating the top two rows. Harry could agree they all looked nice - he couldn’t quite tell the difference between most of them. “Timeless - easy to tame with a bit of product - popular with gentlemen of all ages.”

The worst possible outcome, Harry figured, was that he’d grow it all back into the Potter bird’s-nest overnight if he hated it. “I’ll trust your judgement, sir,” he told the barber.

Twenty minutes later, an impressive pile of hair had gathered on the floor, and Harry was looking in the mirror in nothing short of utter amazement. “It’s perfect,” he declared, putting an extra fifty-pound note on top of the bill. He didn’t even mind how the new style bared the scar on his forehead. He looked cool.

“Come back anytime, lad,” the barber called after him as he left.

There were hours yet until Harry had to be back at Privet Drive - midsummer days in England were, among other things, long, and the Dursleys would certainly not return to Little Whinging before sunset, not when Marge’s house was over an hour’s drive away. Train service back to Surrey from London was frequent enough that Harry needn’t worry about the schedule, either, which left him with quite a lot of options for the rest of his day.

He stepped into a cafe and considered it over tea. The only errand left for the day was to get copies made of Number Four’s house key; after that, he would have just shy of nine hundred pounds left in the satchel. He would be coming back next week or so to pick up the rest of his clothes from Harrods, but he was already planning to write to Sirius for more money between now and then, so he was free to spend the rest of his current money as he wished.

Briefly, as he ordered a second round of tea sandwiches, Harry entertained a trip to Diagon Alley. It was - per the map of the Underground he’d gotten at a kiosk in the department store - only a few stations away. But that would mean risking his newfound anonymity, and for what? The only shiny things he’d seen in Diagon were that solid gold cauldron, and he didn’t even like Potions. 

No, best to stay on the Muggle side of things, he decided. And furthermore, to take his time for once, instead of rushing through his latest adventure. In fact, Harry thought, comfortably well-fed and beginning to get sleepy, I think I’ll just go back early.

This proved a well-timed decision. The rare sunny day in London had turned overcast in Surrey when Harry’s train reached the station; he watched fog roll in as he took the bus back to Little Whinging, carried by a cool breeze that seemed to promise rain. Harry stopped in at the Tesco on his walk back to Privet Drive to get an umbrella, one accessory he hadn’t thought to buy in Harrods, and since he was already there, a rotisserie chicken.

Outside the store only a few minutes later, it seemed even more cold and damp, to the point where it was beginning to get on his nerves. Harry lengthened his strides on the route back to Number Four, determined to beat the weather, and was so distracted that he didn’t notice Dudley until they nearly bumped into each other.

Or, for that matter, the dementors.